Tolkien and Lewis weren’t only fanboys (though they certainly were that by the standards of their time). They were scholars, and scholars at the top level. Tolkien’s work was the fruit of decades, not only of storytelling, but of mastering his source material. All those rich passages in The Lord of the Rings, and in the collateral works, spring from his profound knowledge of European languages, a subject he may have known better than anyone who ever lived. It all started with inventing a language. The story grew from the grammar. The depth of the man’s scholarship is like a rock foundation under every sentence he wrote, every name he bestowed on a character. The books feel real because he knew what he was writing about.
One upon a time, long ago, I was briefly the managing editor of the Intercollegiate Review. My first professional book review — of Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings — appeared there.
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